Planting Karma Seeds: a Meditation Journey

Planting Wisdom: Karma Reflections and a Meditation Journey

Man, it would be so cool to learn meditation.

Here's a story about reconnecting with my first meditation teacher after nearly two decades.

The focus is on the seeds we plant continuously through our karma (deeds). What kind of seeds are we planting right now?

• VIDEO: The Seeds from Long Ago (YouTube)

Beat poet Jack Kerouac

I remember when I first learned how to meditate [by being mindful of] my breath some time in 1990, during my university years.

Back then, meditation was not as well known. The Beat Generation’s Zen trend in the 1960s had died out with disco in the 1970s.

Barnes and Noble had maybe only a few shelves in a single bookcase labeled with “Eastern Philosophy” that covered all Eastern religions, including Buddhism.

Ram Das’s cryptic book Be Here Now was the only book I had read prior to reading my World Religions book, which included a chapter on Buddhism for a class I took.

Be Here Now (Ram Dass for Neem Karoli Baba)

It was different in the early 1990s. There wasn’t a World Wide Web, Google, or even a digital Yahoo. We didn’t have Idiot or Dummy books back then. While there were books out there, you really had to explore a subculture, and you had to know someone in order to know what the subcultures were and where to find them.

Luckily, I had a friend who was into Zen, and he was considering becoming a Catholic priest at the time. He recently transferred from UC Berkeley, not far from San Francisco, which might be called the subculture mecca of the United States, certainly for the "weird" things like meditation. I asked him to teach me. I thought it would be good for me to learn from him.

He agreed and came over to my apartment one night to teach me a lesson I would never forget. I remember we were sitting on the floor of the living room during the lesson. I was thinking about TV’s depiction of meditation and what should be happening. Then I said, “Should I light a candle?” He said, “If you want to, you can.”

“Should I light an incense stick?”

Mindfulness of Breathing, Four Elements Meditation

“If you want to, you can. You can have representations of the Four Elements.”

He explained it to me, but I did not really know what he meant, so I lit a candle and an incense stick to fit my world view of what "meditation" should be like. Before we started, he gave me a little bit of a lesson on the story of the Buddha and how he became enlightened.

He then told me some things about the sitting posture and to press my tongue against the roof of my mouth and to swallow a lot in a natural way. “They say it is good for you,” he said.

Then he taught me how to count my breaths “Zen style.” I would silently and inwardly count the exhales of my breaths one by one until I got up to ten. Then I would count backwards back down to zero. Then up to ten again, and then back to zero. I would repeat these cycles until it was time to stop. If I lost my count, I would just start all over again from “one.”

After our session was over, he left and that was more or less “The Lesson.” After that, I do not know why, but I continued with this practice and other forms of meditation almost every day, more or less for the rest of my life (with some exceptions of course).

Twenty years later, in 2010, I visited Ulpathkanda, Hantanna (Spring Hill Monastery) near Kandy, Sri Lanka, where I was able to use the Internet for the first time in a very long time. I sometimes joked about how I was doing an “Internet retreat” from my full-time life as a forest monk in Na-uyana.

Nevertheless, I was still at a high mountainous jungle forest monastery. I looked up my old friend, my meditation instructor, on the Internet. When we were in college together, he had changed his major from philosophy to whatever one needs to become a Spanish teacher.

It looked as though he had really lived the Spanish lifestyle and moved all over the globe to Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries. The Internet kept track of all the different countries he lived in. It is true that “Big Brother is watching,” just like George Orwell warned, so I could now watch with an Internet connection.

After all of that globetrotting, he settled down in a Connecticut town not too far from where he originally taught me how to meditate. I picked up the monastery phone, dialed the phone card codes, then I dialed his number. The phone rang, and a woman’s voice answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello, my name is Bhikkhu Subhūti, and I was wondering if a Brett [J.] lives here?”

“Yes, he does.”

“May I speak with him please?”

“Uh, okay,” she said in a cautious voice to the stranger on the phone. Perhaps I was a telemarketer to her. They did not know what to expect. There were muffled voices coming through the phone’s speaker, then eventually the phone was passed to Brett.

“Hello, this is Brett.”

I instantly recognized his voice, which had stayed the same all these years.

Hello, this is Bhikkhu Subhuti (Jeremy Glick)

“Hello, this is Bhikkhu Subhūti. You once knew me as Jeremy Glick from Central. Do you remember me?” (Central is a shorthand name for Central Connecticut State University).

“Yes, I remember you, Jeremy.”

I continued, “A long time ago, you came over my place and taught me how to meditate and how to count my breaths. With a few exceptions, I practiced nearly every day, and my practice grew and grew, and eventually I decided to become a Buddhist monk in 2001. Now my name is ‘Bhikkhu Subhūti.’ I looked you up on the Internet so I could call you and say, ‘Thank you.’”

But, hey, um, hello! I'm Jiminy Glick (Martin Short)

There was a long pause. It was five or six seconds of delay before he spoke, so it seemed long. He finally broke the silence and said, “You know, we never know what will happen to the seeds we have planted long ago.”

I did not expect him to still be a teacher of mine, but those were words of wisdom. We caught up on some old times. He was indeed a Spanish teacher and married a woman from Spain. His brother, who was an electrical engineer, quit the industry and now counts caribou in Alaska for a living.

I told him that I never went into teaching, which was expected at college, so I became a computer programmer instead for about six years before leaving all that behind me.

Times have changed and so did the both of us. I told him that I had my brother make me a Facebook account (with two friends), and although as a schoolteacher he was against Facebook, he thought I might be able use it to do something worthwhile for other people. I did not do much with social networks until last year, but I kept his thoughts in mind.

We talked some more and then we parted. If you ever have a chance to thank someone who has affected your life, I highly recommend it. Often, we do not think we make a difference, but we do, positively and, unfortunately, negatively. We always plant seeds in ourselves and others. Some germinate, while others do not.

Sometimes we believe they are trivial sprouts, but some can grow into towering redwoods. It can change a whole person’s destiny. So always plant happy seeds because, “We never know what will happen to the seeds we have planted long ago.”

• Ven. Subhuti (americanmonk.org, Feb. 11, 2024, originally 2014, reposted | American Monk: Life with Buddha, Dhamma and Saṅgha); Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly